In an effort to reduce hospital-acquired infections, Maimonides Medical Center is cleaning up its use of blood pressure cuffs.

This month, the Brooklyn hospital began using disposable liners when taking blood pressure readings. The liners, which were designed by the New York-based Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, are made of plastic and have an antimicrobial coating.

“One of the vectors for disease in hospitals is blood pressure cuffs,” the chairman of the anti-infection group and a former lieutenant governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey, said. “Research shows the inside is heavily contaminated.”

So far, the liners are being tested out in a general medical and surgical unit of the hospital. If they prove to be effective, they could be used on a wider basis. “It’s designed to solve a very practical but important problem,” Ms. McCaughey said.

Scientists Test Gene Therapy to Treat Heart Failure

Physicians and scientists at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center are testing a gene therapy that could be used to treat patients with severe heart failure.

The medical center is the first in New York City to offer the therapy, hospital officials said. The therapy consists of a minimally invasive cardiac catheterization, in which doctors inject an engineered gene that stimulates the production of an enzyme necessary for the heart to pump more efficiently.

“If proven effective, this approach could be an alternative to heart transplant for patients without any other options,” the study’s principal investigator and the medical director of cardiac transplantation at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, Dr. Donna Mancini, said.

Buffalo Doctor Named President of Medical Association

A Buffalo-area internist, Dr. Nancy Nielsen, was elected president of the American Medical Association, becoming the second woman to hold the top position in the group’s 163-year history.

A former trustee of the State University of New York, Dr. Nielsen is a senior associate dean for medical education at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Buffalo. She entered medical school at 29, after giving birth to her fifth child. She earned her medical degree in 1976 from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

In an inaugural address to members of the medical association, Dr. Nielsen called on physicians to become “engineers who design a signature American solution for a better health care system.”esolomont@nysun.com